Robert Siodmak’s Mollenard (1938)
Having fled his native Germany in 1933 due to the increasing threat of Nazism, Robert Siodmak made some films in France before coming to Hollywood just before World War II started. He had been noted in his early days for experimental pictures like People on Sunday (1929), a portrait of Berliners made in collaboration with Edgar G. Ulmer and Billy Wilder, and Abschied (1930), which is set in an apartment house and features two of the best-looking actors of the period, Brigitte Horney and Aribert Mog.
Siodmak was at his best with thrillers and dark tales of fate, but his own fate and circumstances sometimes saw him taking on lighter fare, and this is what he was doing in France before getting the chance to make Mollenard (1938), his best early film, a daringly structured story of an uncouth and violent but soulful man locked in battle with a rigidly respectable woman who mistakenly married him in her youth. It is based on a novel by the Belgian writer Oscar-Paul Gilbert, who co-wrote the film with the heavy-hitter screenwriter Charles Spaak, who had co-scripted two masterpieces, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Jean Gremillon’s Gueule d’amour, just the year before.
But what really made this movie a highlight for Siodmak was its lead actor, the great Harry Baur, who plays the title role. Baur is one of those performers who have such depth of feeling and character in their face that they seem in touch with some kind of secret knowledge; his face is so hangdog that it looks like Baur has been someplace far beyond exhaustion. No matter how badly his Mollenard behaves, Baur himself is helplessly likable and magnetic, and it is made clear that Mollenard is a kind of star in his maritime milieu; people are always talking about him and heralding his return into barrooms.
Mollenard begins with a ten-minute sequence set in Dunkirk where we meet the despised Madame Mollenard (Gabrielle Dorziat, perfect), and an enormous amount of information about their marriage and situation is introduced in the smoothest possible way, an advantage of scriptwriters who really know what they are doing. Mollenard has been at sea for 20 years while Madame Mollenard has done her best (or worst) to make well-mannered simps out of her two children with him, a young teenaged boy and girl. Appearance and stature are all to Madame Mollenard. When she hears that her husband has been trading arms for his own profit and is going to be suspended for six months, she dreads his being around the house and “hearing his vulgarities.”
To a priest retainer, the staunchly religious Madame Mollenard speaks of how her husband “defiled” her love for him, and both Dorziat and Siodmak make sure that we cannot dismiss Madame Mollenard in spite of her rigidity and disgust. There is the ghost of the girl she was in Dorziat’s face, and that girl might have warmed to more gentleness or understanding from her lower-class husband. (By contrast, the wife played by Rosalind Ivan in Siodmak’s The Suspect {1944} is unrelievedly hateful and loathsome but similarly concerned only with appearance.)
We leave Madame Mollenard for a full 45 minutes so that Siodmak can immerse us in the far rougher world of Mollenard himself, but we have been prepared to remember her as we watch all the skulduggery and fighting and drinking that goes on in that world. Baur’s Mollenard is as obsessed with his wife as she is with him; when her name is mentioned, he feels the need to unload a monologue about how much he hates her propriety and how she “gives me the creeps.” Asked about love, Baur’s face takes on a devastating look of wistful regret as he says, “I wouldn’t know.”
By the time he gets back to Dunkirk, Mollenard is prepared for a big confrontation with the wife he has not seen in so long. “Kiss me,” she orders him on the dock, to which he replies, “I’d rather die.” He goes out and gets drunk, and Madame Mollenard knows what she will be facing when he gets back and warns her children to watch out, but these two are equally matched opponents. It is easy to believe that they once foolishly fell in love in their youth, and also easy to believe that that love turned to festering hate fairly quickly. The film is set up to have us see Mollenard as the hero or anti-hero, but careful writing, playing, and direction give just enough of a case to Madame Mollenard to make their war with each other feel weighted with fault on both sides. This is just one of those unfortunate situations that can sometimes define two lives forever.
Both Mollenard and Madame Mollenard can be spiteful, and when he loses his health it is made clear that she vindictively enjoys having him reduced to invalid status. Only the loyalty of his crew offers Mollenard the release he finally seeks, and the way Siodmak dramatizes this looks forward to the triumphs he had with the Hollywood noir of Christmas Holiday (1945), The Killers (1946), and Criss Cross (1948). There is a DVD of Mollenard in circulation, and this Siodmak film deserves to be better known, for it belongs with his best work of the 1940s.